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Photography and it’s Trails Out of Kosovo
By Pedro Meyer "He
had been walking for two days, in someone else’s clothes, trying
to find a way of out of Kosovo when he came across a photograph lying,
face up, by the side of the road."
"He looked,
and looked again, at the pretty fair hair and blue eyes of the smiling
child staring back at him from the crumpled picture. It was his daughter."
Chris Stephen in
Morine , Albania writing for the Evening Standard in London, recounts
as " Bashkim’s mind was by then close to shutdown. Four days
ago Serb paramilitaries in black balaclavas had arrived in his village,
Krajlan, near the central Kosovan town of Klina.
"They had rounded
everyone up, separating the men from the women and children, and Bashkim
had feared the worst. With about 500 men he was ordered into a field
outside the village and they were all told to strip. The men’s
clothes were piled in a heap, but the expected executions never took
place."
"Instead the
men spent a sleepless night naked in the rain, before being divided
into two groups. Ninety were separated and led away. Bashkim has no
idea about their fate. He, like the rest, was told to put on clothes
— any clothes, from the huge sodden pile- and leave. They did so
quickly. As they walked away, machine gun fire rang out from the direction
where the ninety had been marched.
"Bashkim never
found out what happened to them. By the following morning he was with
150 of the others, feeling tired, hungry, and fearful of bumping into
more Serb paramilitaries when he came across the photograph. A little
further up the trial, he noticed another - of his uncle- and further
still one of his wife. And then he understood.
" His wife,
in her desperation to guide her husband out of danger had torn up the
family photo album leaving pictures to mark a path he could follow out
of the country to safety. Soon other men found similar photographs on
the ground or stuck to rocks and bushes, all marking a paper trail along
a series of mountain tracks which led them eventually to the Albanian
frontier.
In one instance
we have the ingenuity of humans using photographs in an almost fairy
tale manner by leaving a trail of pictures amidst the war stricken region
of the Balkans; in the other instance we have high tech x-ray images
of an entire truck to detect the presence of humans as they are hidden
away among a load of wares. It is uncanny how photography is at the
heart of both stories. Images are with us every where in these wars,
they are to be found on the monitors that pilots use to scan what they
are going to bomb on the ground 15 000 ft. below or on the television
newscast reporting on those same events. Pictures are used by the military
establishment to confirm that their missions have been accomplished.
The news industry use images to communicate to the public what is happening.
Pictures are taken of refugees for identification papers. But all this
we more or less already know, what struck me however as quite different
and surprising this time was to receive an email from someone in Macedonia,
in the middle of the war torn Balkans, commenting on his visit to ZoneZero
as he was looking at photographs.
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From:
igor kocoski <buv@mol.com.mk>
I
already read your magazine. It is wonderfull. I am Dragi Nedelcevski
from Tertovo, Republic of Macedonia.
My
E-mail adrress is: nedelcevski.yahoo.com
I
am doing b&w and colour photography. Maybe i shall send some to
You!
Pedro
Meyer
We do not know
who is putting up these pages, which contains "the Serbian side"
of the story, but above all else, we find that the photographs mostly
not seen and published in the west are in themselves a very important
source of information.
Again, we find
the role of photography to be ubiquitous, and that in spite of bombs
and black outs, the internet keeps sending out such messages to allow
us to form a better understanding of all that is going on as we seek
information from diverse sources and of all persuasions.
Pedro Meyer's photographs are found in the collections of more than 40 major museums throughout the world. He's also authored several books, including Los Cohetes Duraron Todo el Dia; Tempii di America; and Espejo de Espinas. His column appears each month in Camera Works.
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 ©Pedro Meyer 2001
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